Dec. 21, 2007 InfoWorld recently polled top executives from Sun, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco, among other leading IT firms, on their predictions for the green-technology market in 2008. Overwhelmingly, these IT innovators foresee booming demand for greener computing solutions as companies struggle with rising energy costs and dwindling server space. Here's a rundown of the trends we should expect to see more of in the coming year.

Better power monitoring: Energy management and data management will become more intertwined as power-hungry datacenters prove increasingly expensive to run. "As a datacenter administrator, I would want to monitor not only my processing efficiency and storage utilization but also the energy consumption and heat dissipation of all the major components of my IT infrastructure," explains Tom Clark, principal engineer at Brocade and chair of the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) Green Storage Initiative. Expect to see more intelligent sensors and advanced analytics to monitor and improve equipment use, says Drew Clark of IBM Venture Capital Group. Echoes Paul Marcoux, Cisco's newly minted chief sustainability officer, "In 2008, we'll see a slew of technologies developed to offer real-time monitoring intelligence to measure energy consumption for products. By 2009, there will be few products available that cannot be monitored for energy consumption." (In fact, Cisco is banking on it. For more on the company's green-products push, click here.)

The jury appears to be out on performance-per-watt (PPW), a metric that's gaining popularity among IT professionals. Larry Vertal, senior strategist at AMD, sees PPW as quickly overtaking performance alone as the chief concern among IT managers. Lewis Curtis, an infrastructure architect at Microsoft, says companies that rely on solely the PPW model will likely still see their energy bills rise as demand for server and storage capacity continues to outpace efficiency measures such as server consolidation. (Whether the power grid can keep up with this demand is another worry. Dave Douglas, director of eco responsiblity at Intel, says the odds are climbing for a "high-impact power outage" in 2008.)

Data restructuring: Current IT practice is wildly inefficient, bogged down by outdated or redundant data as well as poor allocation of server functions. Datacenter space limitations will continue to drive customers to "re-architect" their data processing and storage operations, enabling them to do more with less space and save energy in the process, according to Brocade's Tom Clark. Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, goes so far as to suggest that data stored on production systems for more than 60 days will soon be considered "toxic waste." He predicts a growing market for new types of archiving systems that can hold more data for longer periods without interfering with active processes.

Greener suppliers: As major companies like HP and Wal-Mart start looking at their vendors' environmental practices more closely, IT suppliers will have to walk their talk more carefully. Charges of greenwashing in the supply chain may bubble up but, as Brocade's Tom Clark notes, "the subjective motivations of any particular vendor are really irrelevant." The bottom line, according to Drew Clark of IBM Venture Capital Group, is that global interest in green tech is expanding to "unexpected geographies outside the U.S.," and suppliers will strive to serve these new markets by upping investment in green R&D.

Lifecycle management: Pat Tiernan, VP of social and environmental responsibility at HP, sees a growing market for products designed with the entire lifecycle in mind, noting that in the coming years "companies will be more vigilant in implementing plans for disposal, reuse, and recycling."

A recurring theme throughout all these predictions is the important role green IT seems destined to play in addressing global climate change. More than one executive pointed to the likelihood of new government emissions regulations or incentives as key drivers for companies to clean up their act and they may just have to pull together to do it. Conditions are ripe for "industry leaders to combine the power of innovation with collaboration to create the most sustainable model for addressing global climate change," says Cisco's Paul Marcoux. "As a result, across business and IT functions, we'll begin to see industry standards and green languages emerge in 2008 to foster greater communication and collaboration."

How did 2007 match up to expectations? Read this article published by CIO magazine back in January.